Part of what’s difficult about watching movies and TV shows, versus reading books, is that you can’t really “skim” a movie or TV show. Skimming a book is a matter of pace: how much time you give the information to come through.
That’s not totally true: Skimming a book can just as easily be a matter of attention, of percentage. What percent of the information do you actually interpret. In that way, skimming a movie is just as possible. You just put it up on the second monitor and sort of pay attention, sort of don’t. It takes the runtime of the movie. Audiobooks, I guess, are the same way. I hit some really heavy traffic coming back from the holidays. Jack Reacher played out through the whole ride. There is no more skimmable extant fiction than a Jack Reacher novel.
Attention is the machine that turns art into thinking. I’m also hopeful that it can be trained, because it’s a bummer to live in a world full of art you can’t attend to.
One more thing worth training: I used to wish I could keep a routine, but I think a much better skill is restarting a routine that you’ve fallen off of. Something can always knock you off your rhythm, but that’s not a problem if you know you can find it again.
Just wanted to get this out into the world before I miss a post.
EN: Let me catch myself red-handed here. I wrote this minutes before a D&D session, minutes after I cooked dinner. I hadn’t even read the Atlantic article called “The Attention Machine,” or studied up on the concept of attention in machine learning. This isn’t performance art — me half-attending to a blog post about half-attending to things — just me still getting a handle on the daily blog dance. I’ll have something more intelligent to say about attention tomorrow. Scout’s honor.